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Major Areas of Research

Program Description

The Bioinformatics and Computational Biosciences Branch (BCBB) supports the NIAID research mission by leveraging the latest computational technologies to accelerate discovery and remain at the forefront of today's rapid scientific pace. The BCBB partners with clients in the research process by applying bioinformatics and computational biology methods to generate new hypotheses and data, analyze existing data, and ultimately elevate the use of these methods and resources throughout the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The branch is organized into three sections based on expertise: Office of the Chief, Computational Biology Section, and Bioinformatics Development Section. Staff consist of an integrated team of computational biology specialists, bioinformatics software developers, and operations support staff, which includes project managers, business and infrastructure analysts, and communications specialists. The following services are offered:

Additionally, BCBB is developing a new Web application called Nexplorer.

Evolutionary and comparative analyses are important tools used for the annotation of genomes. These analyses are hampered by the diverse file formats used in computational evolutionary analysis and the inability of analysis tools to sync with one another. Visualization and data management applications that can overcome these limitations are valuable for NIAID researchers performing these analyses. Comparative Data Analysis Ontology (CDAO), a data model developed and supported by the phylogenetic community, represents all the sets of concepts in an evolutionary analysis and the relationships among those concepts. BCBB is developing a Web application, Nexplorer3, using a semantic Web framework for visually manipulating comparative data in CDAO format and extracting biologically significant results based on reasoning. In addition, the ontology-based framework allows representation of data in different formats and improves interoperability of applications.